How to rip a DVD or Blu-ray movie

Hollywood wants you to buy its movies on DVD and Blu-ray, but it also wants to control what you do with them once you get home. That doesn’t sit well with us, so we’re going to show you how to do something that Hollywood most definitely does not want you to do: Rip movies and copy them to your computer’s hard drive so you can enjoy them without ever having to get up off your couch to drop a disc in the DVD player. You have everything on your computer digitally, so why would you want to mess around with physical discs? Rip all of your discs and keep them on your computer.

Once you’ve got a movie onto your hard drive, you can do all kinds of other cool stuff with it: Transcode it into a different format so that it’ll play on your smartphone or gaming console, or maybe just delete those annoying FBI warnings that tell you how much trouble you can get in for doing exactly what we’re about to show you.

While we fully acknowledge that the movie industry has the right to protect it’s intellectual property, we also believe that consumers have the right to enjoy the property they purchase. It’s called fair use – if you buy a movie on a disc, then you should have the right to make a back-up copy, or transfer the content to another medium, like a hard drive. Of course, you don’t have the right to distribute or sell copies of the movies you buy, but you probably knew that already.

It may seem obvious, but you’ll need either a DVD or Blu-Ray drive depending on which you want rip.

The process is the same for both DVD and Blu-Ray and can be done on MakeMKV. A Blu-ray will make a huge file, so we recommend you have between 30 and 60 GB of free hard drive space.

Step 1- Before you can start ripping the disc, you’ll need to get around the copy protection. You can use any software you like but MakeMKV makes it incredibly simple. Start by downloading the free, open source software, then put your disc into your drive.

Step 2- Once the program recognizes the disc, click on the big “Open Disc” button and MakeMKV goes to work.

Step 3- After you’ve vanquished the AACS encryption, MakeMKV will return a list of chapters and segments that you can rip. Find your movie (usually the longest title or biggest file) and uncheck all the other boxes. Next, designate an Output Folder where you’d like the file to end up once it’s been ripped. When you’re all ready to go, hit the “Make MKV” button. This process can take anywhere from two minutes to half an hour depending on your computer’s processing power, but when it’s done you should have a nice big MKV file waiting for you in the folder you specified.

Now you have a giant file you need to transcode so you can use it on different devices.

Step 1- Open HandBrake and click on Source in the top left corner, and find the file you just ripped.

Step 2- Now you get to decide where you want to watch your movie. The developers have already created presets for most Apple products, including the iPhone, iPodand iPod Touch, and Apple TV; the PS3andXbox 360 gaming consoles; and several other platforms. You can also modify any of these presets and save them with new names or create custom presets from scratch. Choosing one of these will adjust the settings automatically to fit whatever you choose.

Step 3– If you are planning on watching it on your computer, you can choose between Normal and High Profile. High Profile produces a larger file, but for either of these options you can tweak anything and everything in the advanced settings.

Step 4- Play around with the settings until you’ve got everything just right, then go ahead and click Start. This part will take a while, so sit back, relax, and let HandBrake do its thing.